Tourists flock to Death Valley to experience near-record heat wave

One of hottest places on Earth is drawing more visitors this week, not in spite of near-record high temperatures but because of them.

Tourists are flocking to Death Valley National Park — a narrow, 282-foot basin on the California-Nevada border — to experience how the triple-digit temperatures feel against their skin. 

Death Valley is home to Furnace Creek, an unincorporated community that includes a visitors center and an outdoor digital thermometer. Dozens of people have gathered at the temperature reading in recent days, some wearing fur coats as an ironic joke, to experience the heat and snap a picture to impress family and friends on social media.

"I just want to go to a place, sort of like Mount Everest, to say, you know, you did it," William Cadwallader of Las Vegas told the Associated Press this week, adding that he visits Death Valley regularly.

The tourism uptick started late last week and reached an inflection point Sunday when Death Valley reached 128 degrees Fahrenheit, just seven degrees shy of the highest temperature recorded on Earth — 134 degrees Fahrenheit at Furnace Creek on July 1913. 

Death Valley is situated below sea level but is nestled among steep mountain ranges, according to the park service's website. The bone-dry air and meager plant coverage allows sunlight to heat up the desert surface. The rocks and the soil emit all that heat in turn, which then becomes trapped in the depths of the valley.

"It's very hot," said Alessia Dempster, who was visiting from Edinburgh, Scotland. "I mean, especially when there's a breeze, you would think that maybe that would give you some slight relief from the heat, but it just really does feel like an air blow dryer just going back in your face." 

Daniel Jusehus, a runner visiting Death Valley from Germany, snapped a photo earlier this week of a famed thermometer after challenging himself to a run in the sweltering heat.

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"I was really noticing, you know, I didn't feel so hot, but my body was working really hard to cool myself," Jusehus said.

Death Valley's brutal temperatures come amid a blistering stretch of hot weather that's put roughly one-third of Americans under a heat advisory, watch or warning. Heat waves aren't as visually dramatic as other natural disasters, but experts say they're more deadly. A heat wave in parts of the South and Midwest killed more than a dozen people last month.

–The Associated Press contributed to this report.